Pilot Program Will Work To Bridge Gaps Between Foster Care, Youth Homelessness

Daniel Rupert shares his story about growing up in foster care and experiencing homelessness as a young adult in Athens. Photo by David DeWitt.

ATHENS – For around 18 months in his early 20s, Daniel Rupert was homeless in Athens, living out of a large duffel bag, spending his days at Ohio University’s Alden Library and spending his nights in either a tucked-away part of the alley behind Chipotle, on the steps by Glidden Hall, or close to the outside heating vents near Alden.

“You learn pretty quickly that vagrancy is frowned upon,” he said in an interview late last month. Rupert, now 28, had already used up his 90-day allotment at the Timothy House shelter for people experiencing homelessness on Athens’ West Side.

He was in the process of applying for housing through the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), but he had no place to go, and when he couldn’t couch surf, he was on the street. It took years for Rupert to find his way to consistent food, shelter and employment, he said.

Rupert’s story is not uncommon: He spent most of his childhood from age 3 on jumping from foster home to foster home, in and out of various programs. He lived with different families in Gallipolis, McArthur and Vinton County, Jackson and Bidwell.

Rupert lived in Chillicothe for over three years with one family who had also been fostering his sister.

At age 10, however, they adopted her but not him, so he went back into the system. Next he went to Millersport in Fairfield County. At age 12, he was placed with the Sojourners Care Network based in McArthur.

Sorjourners is a nonprofit that provides foster care, runaway and homeless youth services, serving Appalachian Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia.

“I started in a home, and whenever I ended up causing a scene or being too much of a hassle, they placed me in a different home because I was a bit of a pain in the butt,” Rupert acknowledged. “My way of doing things was, if I couldn’t figure out a way to solve a problem, if I didn’t like the way things were going, I’d make a scene until I got moved. That carried on for a long time.”

Rupert bounced around a lot for a short period of time – about six homes in two years – until age 14 when he moved in with a family that helped him “chill out and calm down,” as he put it. Then he began to have problems with peers in school, getting into fights.

“I decided to quite literally run from the problem, run away from the foster home, which ended up getting me placed in Jackson,” he said. Eventually he ended up in Columbus, where he fought with another kid in foster care who had threatened the foster parent, and Rupert was sent to the Buckeye Boys Ranch.

After that, he was placed with Mary and Bob Tromn, whom he called “the best people ever for the system.” They helped him finish high school and set him up to attend the Ohio University branch campus in Chillicothe.

“But financial aid got screwed up, so that starts the entire period of being homeless,” he said.

Rupert had “aged out” of the system, as happens with many children who bounce around in foster care. “The system tries to prepare you, and foster families try to teach you skills. But I didn’t have much experience in job hunting or interviews.”

And he had no support network of family to fall back on when times got tough. The local Job & Family Services agency set him up with an apartment for two months, expecting financial aid to pay for it after that. When financial aid didn’t come through, he had to drop out. Unable to find a job, Rupert ended up squatting in that apartment for several more months.

“I was job hunting, but had no luck,” he recalled. After being kicked out, he went to stay with a former foster parent, but wasn’t allowed to remain after it became clear Rupert was not heterosexual.

Rupert bounced around, including participating in a transitional living program with Sojourners. He tried convincing the foster parent he was straight (heterosexual) and that it was all a misunderstanding, but he lost his home again when it became clear that wasn’t true.

“I was homeless from there on. I had nothing. I had a duffel bag on my back and that was it,” he said. This is when he got set up with the Timothy House in Athens.

After three months there, he began his period of homelessness in Athens, for 18 months sleeping in alleys and alcoves or on couches when he could find them, and spending his days in Alden Library. Eventually, an agency in Nelsonville got him set up with a place to stay on Hocking Street in Athens for several years, and then HUD came through. Rupert got a job in Athens, and he found some measure of stability, though he’s currently looking for work again.

YOUTH HOMELESSNESS, especially in the LGBTQ+ community, is a major issue in America and Ohio. Since 2009, the number of children in Ohio’s child welfare system has increased by about 19 percent, while agency funding has dropped by 17 percent.

Homelessness among youth often stems from domestic violence, behavioral and mental-health issues, and/or personal safety concerns for LGBT youth. In addition, transition-age youth up to 24 years old often encounter a variety of barriers when trying to get help through the traditional adult homeless service system.

High poverty, high unemployment and the opioid crisis make southeast Ohio particularly challenging for youth struggling to find a safe place to live.

Youth who have aged out of the foster-care system are particularly at risk of sexual exploitation and trafficking. A survey by Sojourners found that 95 percent of foster-care youth come from families where one or more adults in the home abused substances and all experienced some form of emotional, physical or sexual abuse.

Last month, the Coalition on Homelessness and Housing in Ohio (COHHIO) was awarded a $2.2 million grant from HUD to implement innovative approached to help end youth homelessness in southeast Ohio.

It’s one of only four rural areas in the country to be awarded such a grant. Local agencies combating homelessness in Athens, Vinton, Meigs, Jackson and Gallia counties will be eligible for portions of the funding.

COHHIO will serve as the lead agency, with a variety of stakeholders participating in developing a plan for a pilot program to figure out best practices and innovative approaches to combat this problem. Participants will include homeless service providers, schools, child-welfare agencies, youth advisory boards, the Ohio Department of Education and other community partners.

Locally, this will include the Sojourners Care Network and Integrated Services of Appalachian Ohio.

Sojourners Co-Executive Director Rich Games said in a recent interview that he hopes the pilot program will help afford the time and opportunity for different agencies to really coordinate their efforts.

“You have child welfare, which is job and family services and foster care networks and other child-welfare services, and you have that system,” Games explained. “Then you have a whole other system that is runaway and homeless youth. And they traditionally don’t interact.”

With this grant, those two systems will join efforts to bridge gaps in service.

“Because they’re not connected, young people fall through the cracks,” Games said. “We look forward to partnering with COHHIO and other agencies to devise an innovative plan to end youth homelessness in our community.”

COHHIO Continuum of Care Director Erica Mulryan said last month that the lessons they learn from this pilot project can be applied more broadly throughout rural Ohio and even at the national level.

“We expect any projects that we develop, any new resources we make available as a result of having access to these funds, those projects will exist indefinitely,” she said.

HUD wants to learn through this program the best ways to develop high-quality community planning and coordination that can be replicated in other places, she said.

“That can have a real, meaningful impact on the goals to reduce and end youth homelessness,” she said. “They want to learn about new and innovative ways of providing assistance. It’s an opportunity to impact national policy and the direction the agencies are going. It’s really exciting.”

RUPERT NOTED THAT THE biggest area of need is helping young people in the system develop life skills, job and interview training and financial literacy.

“Being homeless is a traumatic experience,” he said. “It’s simple things that most people learn from their family and through school that you take for granted. And if something doesn’t work out, most people have a safety net with family and resources. When you’re homeless and whatnot, you don’t have that safety net. You’re done. You’re scraping by. You need those life skills.”

D.C. DeWitt is a writer and man of sport and leisure. He has also written for Government Executive online, the National Journal’s Hotline, and The New York Observer’s Politicker.com. He is the Associate Editor of The Athens NEWS in Athens, Ohio. DeWitt can be found on Facebook and Twitter @DC_DeWitt.

Good article on an urgent problem. I was a volunteer guardian ad-litem for a decade. What happens to these children is that at 18, they are no longer eligible for foster care benefits and their case is closed. The foster family receives no money from the state to house these children and they are essentially turned out in most cases. What is needed is a program, with adequate money, connected to the housing sector that receives each case of foster children who are reaching the age in which their case is terminating. This has been going on for years and society is essentially relying on the foster family to house these children with their own resources. A non-profit organization that is attached to the family court that has money and access to the terminated cases of children exiting the system is how to deal with this problem.

David DeWitt

That’s a great suggestion! I hope this pilot program makes strides in that direction. I have friends who recently started fostering and I’m learning a lot about it so I intend to continue to shine the spotlight to create more awareness among the general public. As always, I appreciate your feedback!